Eli Ben-Sasson is the Co-Founder and CEO of StarkWare Industries, the company behind Starknet — one of Ethereum's leading zero-knowledge rollup scaling solutions. He is a co-inventor of STARK (Scalable Transparent ARguments of Knowledge) and FRI (Fast Reed-Solomon Interactive Oracle Proof of Proximity), two foundational cryptographic primitives that underpin modern zero-knowledge proof systems.
Ben-Sasson's academic career includes positions at the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology, where he conducted pioneering research on probabilistically checkable proofs (PCP) and zero-knowledge proofs. His work on STARKs, published with co-authors including Alessandro Chiesa and Michael Riabzev, introduced a new family of zero-knowledge proofs that are transparent (requiring no trusted setup), post-quantum resistant and scalable.
He co-founded StarkWare in 2018 with Uri Kolodny, Alessandro Chiesa, Michael Riabzev and others. The company developed StarkEx, a validity-proof scaling engine used by dYdX, Sorare and other protocols, and Starknet, a general-purpose ZK-rollup that launched on Ethereum mainnet in 2023. As CEO, Ben-Sasson leads StarkWare's mission to scale blockchains using cryptographic integrity proofs. Information last checked: August 2026.
